Porsche - A Brief History
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Ferdinand Porsche played an important role in the development of airplanes and racing cars, and the construction of tanks for the Wehrmacht. He is an automobile engineer with more than aa thousand patents to his name. He was appointed chief engineer at Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart in the 1920s. Later on, he set up his own engineering workshop and designed among others
the Volkswagen. At the plant where Volkswagen was made, Wolfsburg, he was chief of operations and at the end of the war he was interned by the Allies.
He was released a few years later and started building his first car with his son, Ferry Porsche. The car was named the Porsche 356 and it was a sports car and reminiscent of the Volkswagen.
It had the same four-cylinder boxer engine that was rear-mounted, just like the VW. It was far from being a powerful sports car, developing only 40 bhp and a maximum speed of 87 mph (140 km/h).
First produced as a convertible and later as a hard top it distinguished by the very elegant and innovative body. It was developed in the workshop of Erwin Komenda, a master of restrained streamlining who had been in charge of sheet metal and design techniques at Porsche since the VW Beetle. The new style of closed coupe was designed by Komenda and it soon became the embodiment of the sports car, thanks to its fastback.
This tradition was continued by Komenda and Ferdinand “Butzi” Porsche, the founder’s grandson, with the 911.
The 911 became easily recognizable: it had attractive sloping bonnet and what later became characteristic “frog eye” headlights, curves running from the top edge of the windscreen to the rear bumper and a straight waistline. From a functional and technical point of view it was more like BMW 1500, although it retained the stylistic features of the original Porsche. The new 911 will become the foundation stone of Porsche’s identity, even though the design was not always appreciated. During the 1970s and 1980s, the designers attempts to distance Porsche from its legendary design brought the company to the edge of disaster. The more modern 924 model, “a people’s Porsche”, developed with Volkswagen, as well as the 928 were far from fulfilling the expectations.
In the 1990s, the company realized that what for over twenty years was perceived as a straitjacket, it was in fact a market advantage. During the 1990s, Porsche became highly profitable since they now knew that the typical Porsche features were timeless. Nearly forty people now worked in the design department on further developments of the long-running 911.
These developments included the 911 GTI, a powerful combination of sports and racing car, put forward by the in-house designer Anthony R. Hatter. In 1999, chief designer proudly presented the new Boxster which enabled Porshe to establish a second independent range of models.
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Porsche - The Beginning
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It’s hard to say exactly which is the beginning of Porsche story. It could be in 1950, when the famous Max Hoffman introduced the Porsche 356 to the United States. Or in 1948 when the first automobile to bear the name Porsche was introduced.
But in order to understand Porsche’s heritage and its philosophy we need to go back to 1875, when, in September, at the home of a tinsmith in the Bohemian village of Haffersdorf, a son was born. His name was Ferdinand Porsche.
Since his adolescence, Ferdinand Porsche showed glimpses of technical genius: at the age of 18, he wired family’s home for electricity in 1893. Still, he didn’t show many signs of disciplined engineering skills that will eventually become his trademark. Even if the “Doctor” is usually appended to his name, it is in essence honorary, since his only formal technical training was as a part-time engineering student in Vienna.
By the age of 25, the young Ferdinand Porsche had entered the field of automotive design. His first car design was already accepted by Lohner & Co. of Vienna. Over the next 20 years, Ferdinand Porsche, the temperamental but brilliant engineer succeeded in associating with every major automobile manufacturer in Germany. At the same time, he designed a dozen of the most technically significant cars in history.
Working for Mercedes-Benz, he helped develop the most revered Mercedes-Benz cars of all time: the SSK series. For NSU, he designed Auto Union Wanderer and the Type 32, a precursor of the Volkswagen Beetle.
After being dismissed from Mercedes for disagreeing with the firm’s staid engineering policies, Porsche decided to establish what later became Porsche A.G.: his own engineering consulting group. In a small office in Stuttgart, the senior Dr. Porsche gathered a select group of engineers to work under the dramatic name, “Doctor of Engineering Ferdinand Porsche, Inc., Construction Facility for Land, Air, and Sea Transportation.”
One of his employees was his youthful son, Ferry. His primary interest was one that any young man might select: sports and racing cars The senior Dr. Porsche and his team were kept extremely busy. The consulting firm developed for Steyr (now the utility-vehicle wing of the Steyr- Daimler-Puch combine), the Austria luxury sedan, but it did not progress beyond the prototype stage. They worked a lot for Auto Union, now Audi: the company developed the Front, the world’s first front-drive economy car. They astonished Auto union with the mid-engine Grand Prix cars and their supercharged V-12 and V-16 engines which, together with Mercedes- Benz racers, dominated European auto racing for nearly a decade.
After that, the firm created its best-known designs for NSU and Zundapp. The pair of prototypes was characterized by Dr. Porsche’s patented torsion-bar suspension and a rear-mounted engine. Since neither company moved rapidly enough to manufacture the designs, Porsche sold the concept to the German government. Then, he oversaw the construction of a plant on Wolfsburg to manufacture the design. His drawings called the car the Type 60. The world came to know it as the Volkswagen Beetle.